Stay True

 Stay True by Hua Hsu is one of the great memoirs of this era. A terrific book. I carved out extra time to read it--changing routines and ignoring obligations--so moved was I by story, the setting, the characters. I hesitate to divulge too much in this review, but know that the subject includes friendship, 90's music, grief, college, identity, California, authenticity, and the immigrant experience. Anyone who lived through the 1990's will find countless familiar references within this slim volume. Hsu is a brilliant observer of meticulous detail. He infuses so much specificity in his paragraphs that you feel as though you're cataloging the moment in real time, standing at his side. 

It's difficult to express how powerful the blend of authentic human emotion combined with crystal-clear craftsmanship is maintained in Stay True. It recalls the best elements of other great memoirs. Evoking the pathos of Crying in H Mart, the erudition of The Year of Magical Thinking, and the accurate nostalgia of Just Kids, it's an immersive experience. In my eager first reading (I will definitely reread this book), I was brought to to the edge of real tears, while also marveling at the perfect--perfect--structural composition. Stay True is glacier-fed water: sparkling and cold, pure without blemish, and bright in the sunlight.

Reign of Terror

 Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman is a vital, if depressing, read. Most of the book is a horrific litany of American overreaction to the 9/11 attacks, at home and abroad. Hauntingly, the prologue documents the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and the responses the government did not take: no expanded surveillance, no torture, no mass suspicion of an entire group of people. Ackerman claims the difference in blunt--and convincing--terms, arguing that Timothy McVeigh was white. The "Forever War" that we're still living in, decades since 9/11, is coldly described in chapter after heartbreaking chapter. No president escapes blame, especially not the last two who've been publicly critical of the War on Terror. I've lived in this reality my entire adult life, and I remember much of the events described in Reign of Terror, but it's sobering to read them in an unsparing historical account.

The "thesis" of Reign of Terror is explained in the subtitle, but I don't know how clearly the line from 9/11 to Trump is presented. It's more a quietly outraged critique of a global war against a vague concept, "terror," and how destructive that lack of clarity can be. Late in the book, Ackerman describes the "endless nightmare" of the war. "In response to 9/11," he writes, "America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people--a full total may never be known--terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime, and declared most of its actions to be legal or constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations. Through it all, America said other people, the ones staring down the barrel of the War on Terror, were the barbarians."

Pedro Páramo

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is one of the most influential works of Latin American literature. The edition that I read, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford, was a surreal novella that was at times inaccessible. I don't think the translation was the problem: Rulfo himself said that Pedro Páramo should be read three times before it can be understood. I found it baffling and beautiful, best read at a pace that ignores certain details while keeping a leery eye on the title character.

The novella begins with a narrator returning to the place of his birth to find his father. Within pages, the narrative voice changes and other characters begin storytelling. The blending perspectives cross into the afterlife as well--and a sense of time, as well as who is dead and who is alive--is all blurred in this collage of voices. It probably takes a few more readings to make sense of it all, but the story does seem to take shape in its final third. The ending is strange and satisfying. Given its links to Modernism and early Magical Realism, as well as interesting 20th-Century Mexican revolutions that flare up in the periphery of the main story, Pedro Páramo is deserving of the multiple readings that it requires.